Wednesday, October 22, 2014

Room on the Broom: a Halloween Freebie!

Hi friends! Happy Wednesday!!

I'm Kelly from Sweet Sounds of Kindergarten, and I am so excited and honored to be blogging at The Primary Pack today. What a wonderful group of ladies to be a part of! I'll be back here each month on the 22nd to share with you some new ideas and insights from my first grade classroom.

Today I want to talk about one of my FAVORITE holidays… Halloween!! I'm sure most of you have already started doing Halloween activities in your classrooms, like I have. However, I think the picture below pretty much sums up how most of us feel about it this year.

I am super happy that Halloween is on a Friday this year so I don't have to deal with the dreaded day or days after while the kids are recovering from their sugar rush. :)

Leading up to Halloween next week, your kiddos will no doubt be getting excited and antsy, so I wanted to share with you a fun, and easy Halloween activity that also meets common core ELA standards and helps your kids practice literary elements!

I recently discovered the book Room on the Broom by Julia Donaldson, and fell in LOVE!! This book is so perfect for primary grades and there are tons of activities that can be
done to teach kiddos story elements.

There is also an adorable video version of the book that is on youtube! If you don't have access to the book, and would like to do the activity that I'm going to show you, I would recommend showing your kids the video. :)

The flow of this book really lends itself to teaching the skill of sequencing. The witch keeps "dropping" things while she's riding the broom, and each time she drops something, a new animal helps her find it! She then invites each of these animals to ride on the broom with her and her cat. Needless to say, her broom gets a little crowded!

I decided to make picture cards to help my kids sequence this story. Here's a picture of how I had the cards set up before we started the activity:

And here's what it looked like after we practiced sequencing the story:

These cards are available in my Room on the Broom Pack on TPT.

After we learned how to sequence, my kiddos completed a worksheet at their tables and independently "sequenced" the story! They cut out the pictures, and glued them in the correct order. Then they labeled the pictures.

As a "challenge" to my advanced learners, I gave them the same worksheet with blank boxes, and had them practice writing complete sentences to sequence the events of the story.

My firsties had a great time doing this activity, and I know that your kiddos will too!! As a special "Primary Pack" FREEBIE for you, I am giving you the sequencing worksheets from my pack for you to use with your class. Click on the picture below to download your worksheets:

There are so many other story elements that can be taught using Room on the Broom: characters, setting, story order, etc…

Another fun FREEBIE in my TPT store to help teach story elements to your kiddos are my story elements posters! I have these posters laminated and magnatized on my whiteboard. I move them around as needed, and together, we write and label different parts of stories!

Please note that the "Fiction" and "Nonfiction" posters are included in a different pack. :)

Click on the picture below to grab this FREEBIE on TPT!!

Thanks for stopping by friends!! I hope that you enjoy using Room on the Broom to teach your kiddos about sequencing! Have a Happy Halloween!!